Trinity Journal of Literary Translation
Sebastian Dreaming For Adolf Loos1 Mother bore the babe in the white moon,
In the shadow of the walnut tree, ancient elderberry, Drunk on poppy juice, the lament of the thrush; And silently
A bearded face bows with compassion over her Quietly in the dark of the window; and the old chattel Of ancestors
Lay broken up; love and autumn reverie. So dark a day in the year, a sad childhood,
As the boy quietly descended into cool water, silver fish, Calm and a face;
As he flung himself hard as stone in front of wild black horses, His star came over him in a gray night;
Or when he, in mother’s freezing hand,
Walked about Saint Peter’s2 autumn cemetery at dusk, A frail corpse lay quiet in the dark of its cell And it lifted cold lids above him.
But he was a little bird in the bare branches, The long bells in the November evening,
The father’s stillness, as he asleep descended winding stairs in twilight.
1 2
Adolf Loos (1870–1933), Austrian architect, whose Viennese circle included many artists and writers, including Oskar Kokoschka and Georg Trakl Saint Peter’s, the cemetery and catacombs at the base of the Festungsberg, a hill overlooking the city of Salzburg.
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